This invention relates to network routing, and more particularly to routing through networks that can be represented as Euclidian graphs, such as a telecommunications network that comprises a plurality of nodes, and links that interconnect the nodes.
A digraph is a representation of a network, converted into nodes and edges. Euclidian graphs are undirected graphs for which nodes have real and distinct physical positions and whose edge weights correlate, at least roughly, to the Euclidian distance between nodes. Various networks have this characteristic, such as telecommunication networks and road networks. One task that is often required in connection with networks is to identify a least-cost path, or paths, between nodes of the network. Algorithms exist for finding such least-cost paths, but because the computation burden of these algorithms is generally proportional to the number of network nodes raised to a power that is greater than 1, and the number of nodes in any reasonable-sized telecommunications network is large, the computations of a least-cost path is quite burdensome.
One approach for obtaining a solution to a least-cost path problem is to employ an algorithm that is parallelizable; that is, an algorithm whereby the problem can be divided into segments and the segments can be processed concurrently by separate processors. When the problem to be addressed is to find a set of least cost paths between N terminal points in one grouping and N terminal points in another grouping, it can divided into N problems, each solving a single-pair-shortest-path (SPSP) problem. However, finding the shortest path between a given pair of terminal points is still quite burdensome when the number of network nodes is large. Tree decomposition methods work, but the decomposition can be more expensive (in terms of processing burden) than the path-finding operation itself.
An algorithm that takes advantage of the attribute of Euclidian graphs, mentioned above, is disclosed in co-pending application titled “An Algorithm for Network Route Selection,” filed in the US Patent Office on Jun. 12, 2007, but this solution is an approximation, and the algorithm is not parallelizable.